The M1 Garand's Mysterious 7th Round Stoppage

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and today we're going to talk about the infamous 7th round stoppage on the m1 i brought this up as an example of problems spontaneously arising during production and how difficult it can be to take a product in the case i'm talking about a firearm but really any industrial mechanized product from prototype to mass production stage and you guys clearly wanted to know more about this seventh round stoppage so that's what we're going to talk about today my reference source on this by the way is julian hatcher's book of the garan which is a fantastic reference work talking about early us adoption of semi-auto rifles and it's not just about the garen although it does talk in detail about the trials and tribulations of developing and adopting the garen but he also talks about a bunch of the other rifles that were tested out notably the patterson and some other interesting more obscure ones anyway so to set the stage this is 1938 the u.s military has the army has formally adopted the m1 garand the marine corps hasn't but the army did the war department is pretty excited about its new self-loading rifle like this is the us is kind of on the cutting edge here nobody else has really taken the step of saying we're going to give every infantryman a self-loading rifle russia has some germany's going to have some she doesn't have a ton of them yeah there's the mondragon in mexico which was basically never used the garen is really cutting edge here so the war department is excited about this and frankly they want to publicize it they want to make the most of this from a pr perspective well as this is happening springfield is just starting to roll out production at once now the role of springfield in this case was intended to be that of sort of a proof of not a proof of concept facility but a play an arsenal where the government or where it would be a repository of experts and expertise where they could build a production line set of tooling for a firearm like the m1 garand and figure out all the little quirks all the stuff like this seventh round stoppage sort of thing and get a complete technical data package complete specs for all the tooling and jigs and dies and fixtures and gauges that you would need to make the m1 or any other firearm on an industrialized basis and then they could if we didn't need a lot of the guns they can make a few and then kind of just put all the tooling and all this data in storage until such time as oh no we're at war we need a million rifles now they have this data package that they can give to other commercial companies private companies who have the industrial capacity to manufacture the guns and those companies won't have to figure this all out from scratch this is frankly a really good idea this is the sort of thing that a nationally funded armory ought to be doing they stopped doing it in the 60s when they shut down springfield but that's a story for a separate time uh so springfield's working on developing this tooling and the shop prototype handmade m1s work great no problems at all they start putting getting guns off this new production line and all of a sudden the problem crops up the seventh round of the rifle will jam instead of loading but it's not always it's only sometimes and they're able to track it down a little bit and realize that it only happens when the top round in the clip is loaded on the right so with an m1 clip you can you can load it has eight rounds and they're staggered but you can load it either way so the top round can be on the left or on the right and in trials the rifle didn't care that was one of the nice things not only could you load the clip either way you could insert the clip into the rifle either way there was no up and down it was either one worked and this was specifically a point of advantage for the m1 over the patterson rifles where the army designed that design the army tested you had to load the clip right way up or it wouldn't work so all of a sudden sometimes if the round's on the wrong side the seventh round will jam which is this truly mysterious problem never showed up in testing it's completely novel what the heck like these rifles look fine and as long as the clip's on the left it's not a problem and yet what the heck well this is happening right as the war department as i mentioned is very excited about its brand new high-tech rifles and the war department is getting ready to ship 200 of them to the national matches at camp perry to show off to all of the shooting media and the gun world media and the top competitive marksmen in the united states this is i mean we still have camp perry matches but at the time think of this perhaps more like shot show that the us government is going to ship 200 of its brand new rifles to shot show and let basically any joe schmoe who shows up try one out what could possibly go wrong well the guys at springfield are freaking out because they know that fifty percent of the time random flip of the coin you have a really good chance of the rifle jamming on the seventh round and how is that going to look at camp perry in front of everybody who's anybody in the shooting world including by the way a whole lot of people who are in this sign of other camp arguing that hey this johnson rifle is actually better than the m1 we should adopt the johnson either in addition to or instead of the m1 well what better for those people than if m1s show up at camp perry and just malfunction left and right so uh there are two problems at stake here two problems at hand one is gotta figure out how this what's causing this problem and how do we fix it and number two it doesn't look like we're gonna be able to do that before it can't parry and we can't convince the war department to scrap these plans they're already people who think that the rifle is a disaster and the war department's hiding behind lies and trickery and if they can't if they like cancel this plan everyone's going to be really sure that there's something tragically wrong with the rifle and it'll be an even bigger mess so first problem uh the officer who's assigned to deal with these rifles at camp perry is in fact colonel james hatcher i mentioned this book was written by julian hatcher james hatcher is his brother both of these men were in the ordinance department james hatcher comes up with a stopgap plan where he modifies the follower the follower thing in the m1 to prevent you from being able to load a clip with the top round on the right so in theory this should prevent any issues he also talks to the army officer who is dealing with all of the ammunition for the m1s of course m1 clips are this brand new thing and there aren't they aren't just out there so if you're going to try out one of these new rifles at camp perry you're going to be getting your ammo from the army and hatcher talks to the army officer who's doing the ammo and makes sure that every clip that they have is loaded with the top round on the left so these 200 rifles all get modified with special followers nobody knows it they don't tell anyone about it and they manage to avoid the problem like there is still a seventh round stoppage issue blaring blinding issue um when these rifles are at camp perry but nobody ever finds out because they manage to prevent anyone from ever encountering the condition where the problem will happen but that is not a sustainable solution for production because unless we want to make these clips you know uni-directional which nobody does that frankly just trying to do that will institute more problems than they've got now they've got to figure it out so you guys are racking their brain it finally comes down to an assistant foreman at springfield by the name of walter campbell who figures it out and uh actually let me just show you exactly what was at stake here or what was happening here okay so in the m1 receiver and by the way i'm totally swiping this from mothias there are two big guide ribs here and here and they're also on this side here and here that hold the clip properly in place while it's in the rifle this side they're really really pretty obvious pretty easy to see the back one has been cut out to allow the follower to slide in it but what happened was in the production room during the production process they had to drill a hole up here for the barrel to fit into the receiver and when they drilled that hole you can see the cut they had to continue in here to drill out sufficient material and when they were at the first stage when they caused this problem they actually drilled through this little nub right here at the top of this guide rail so imagine this curved surface continues all the way through into this void that was it that was the entirety of the problem now this one of course has been fixed what they had to do was stop that cut right here and leave that guide rib intact so it turns out if you don't make that one little tiny cut and by the way it's not always that cut it has to be a combination of that cut plus stacking tolerances in the other parts around it that causes the seventh round stoppage if you don't make that little cut problem completely disappears like it was never there in the first place so they take the existing rifles and they weld up that little bit of guide rail uh mill it down to be you know properly shaped and presto those work fine and then they adjust the tooling uh in the production line at springfield so that it doesn't nip off that little bit of that rail and boom the problem's gone it's like it never never existed in the first place and it all comes down to little tiny changes that are made by the staff on the machine room machine shop floor who are trying to fit they're of course under pressure to manufacture things as quickly and efficiently and you know within the current capacity of all the machine tools as well as possible so they're looking at this and going oh we can just take the top of that off no big deal doesn't matter like this there's this whole guide rib there what do the top doesn't matter and these little tiny changes happen without being documented which is why this took was so difficult for springfield to figure out is no one ever documented it they didn't change the blueprint they just cut it minusculely different than what the blueprint showed as an interesting side note this is uh this is an area of specialty where it's important to have people on a machine shop floor who are shall we say fluent in engineer as well as fluent in machinist and can interpret and say look we like to the engineers if you're drawing it this way we can't effectively cut this thing this way and if they're on the shop floor saying you can't use that tool on this part because it's not going to quite work even though like you have to go do this other operation to make that cut even though it's twice as long because otherwise you get issues like this and inevitably this happens somewhere there were a number of other less substantial occurrences like this during the development of the m1 but that seventh round stoppage is just the perfect example of it because it was a tiny undocumented change to the fabrication of the receiver that led to this immediately obvious and easily documented problem and then one little change and away it goes so that is the story of the seventh round stoppage as documented by julian hatcher who was there at the time and whose brother was the one who had to deal with preventing the press from finding out about it hopefully you guys enjoyed the story thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 376,637

Rating: 4.9799891 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, m1, Garand, production, prototype, 30-06, Springfield, armory, engineer, machine shop, guide rail, 7th round stoppage, stoppage, camp Perry, seventh round, mysterious, Julian hatcher, James hatcher, book of the Garand, ww2, us army, national matches, guns are hard

Id: s5V_qIZEOUg

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CampyTheTerrible]

First thing I did after watching was go to the safe and check if my M1 has that guide rib, as I've experienced 7th round stoppages a few times. I always assumed it was an issue with my en blocs. Anyway, the guide rib is there, but it looks less...substantial? than the one in the video. Mine's a '45 SA production that was rebarreled in the 50s, so now it makes me wonder if the rebarreling process has something to do with it or if by 1945 they were just less concerned with the tolerances.